Gallery: The Last Uncontacted People

Unknown and uncontacted?

Newly released photographs of an uncontacted tribe, previously unknown to the public, were the first such announcement since 2008. Even now, in an age of globalization, satellite photographs and ever-growing industrial populations, uncontacted tribes have yet to be discovered.

According to contacted Yanomami, some uncontacted members of their tribe still exist. They call them the Moxateteu.

Image: A Yanomami village structure./Survival International.

Assumptions of Violence

Uncontacted tribes are typically considered violent, and even used as proxies by researchers trying to calculate rates of conflict and violence in Stone Age life. But such extrapolations may reveal less about Indians than about our methodological limitations.

Anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, for example, infamously wrote that approximately one in three Yanomami men died violently. Yet Chagnon based his results on a relative handful of interviews; accepted what may have been boasts as truths; and generally ignored the possibility that recent history, and not some deep-seated cultural proclivity, might be responsible for conflict.

Chagnon and others — not to mention journalists and television crews — have also been responsible for practicing so-called "checkbook anthropology," rewarding cooperating Indians with motors, guns, alcohol and other objects that sowed the very conflicts they intended to study.

Whatever their culture, Indian tribes deserve to be seen in an evolving historical context, not as living fossils.

Image: Gleison Miranda, FUNAI

Recovery is Possible

Given the dangers posed by the outside world, it can seem that uncontacted and little-contacted tribes are doomed. Yet given the chance, even tribes afflicted by disease and development can recover.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, gold miners invaded the lands of the Yanomami in northern Brazil and southern Venezuela. Miners killed the Indians, both directly through violence and indirectly through disease. Yanomami populations fell.

"Now this area is finally recognized and demarcated by the government," said Fiona Watson, research director of Survival International. "Their population is growing now. The land is free of invasions. If the land is protected, and the resources are there, these people will thrive."

Image: A Yanomami family./Victor Englebert, Survival International

Deadly Mahogany

Though conditions for uncontacted people and other aborigines have slowly improved in Brazil, the situation in Peru — on Brazil's western edge, though the jungle knows no boundary — is getting worse. Logging companies are allowed to clear forests inhabited by people; conflict and disease soon follow, and survivors flee east into lands already occupied by other tribes. Pictured above is a member of the Murunahua tribe, shot in the eye during first contact with loggers.

Fueling the companies is demand for mahogany wood. Peru is the only Amazon country that still permits mahogany to be exported. "The onus lies on the consumers to boycott retailers," said Chris Fagan, executive director of the Upper Amazon Conservancy, an environmental and cultural conservation group that works in southeastern Peru.

Image: Survival International

Isolated by choice

Uncontacted people are not ignorant of the outside world, but remain isolated by choice.

In the Amazon, most are descended from groups who escaped the depradations of the rubber boom, a period of barbarous development that began in the late 19th century and continued well into the 20th. Rubber companies, ranchers and other developers routinely enslaved or exterminated Indians; their actions were arguably genocidal.

At one trial of a man involved in a massacre organized by the Arruda, Junqueira & Co. rubber company, the judge declared: "We have never listened to a case where there was so much violence, so much ignominy, egoism and savagery and so little appreciation of human life." The massacre took place in 1963.

Image: Gleison Miranda, FUNAI

Progress in the Amazon

Until recently in Brazil, where many of the world's remaining uncontacted tribes live, making contact was formal government policy. In 1987, recognition of the disease and cultural conflicts invariably produced by contact led to that policy's reversal.

Brazilian government presence is now limited to surveillance planes far overhead. When a tribe's presence is documented, they're given rights to the land, and left alone. Sometimes, however, uncontacted communities and development are on a collision course. When that happens, the governmnent may initiate contact in the hope of averting further conflict.

The Plight of the Jarawa

The Jarawa, a once-nomadic Andaman island tribe of about 250 people, made contact in 1998, emerging from their small forest preserve to visit nearby towns and settlements.

A road built in the 1970s had split their land in two, giving easy entry to illegal poachers and hastening development on surrounding lands. Contact was an act of desperation.

Since then they've been wracked by outbreaks of measles. The Indian government gives Jarawans food, tobacco and alcohol in exchange for work, and in 2010 a government official announced his intentions to "drastically mainstream" the Jarawa. In February of this year, India's Minister of Tribal Affairs announced his support for this process.

Image: Salome/Survival Internationa

Reasonable Misgivings

When the Sentinelese islanders didn't want help after the 2004 tsunami, it was perfectly understandable. Forced contact with colonial settlers in the 19th century had resulted in at least deaths from disease. In the 1980s and 1990s, shipwreck salvagers visiting their island killed several more.

Despite these problems, the Sentinelese — believed to number between 50 and 200 people, and living on an isolated island — are doing far better than neighbors who made permanent contact. The Onge and Great Andamanese both live in remnant populations on small reserves, unable to practice their traditional ways of living and dependent on government support.

Image: Christian Caron/Survival International

Stay Away: The Sentinelese

While most uncontacted or recently-contacted groups live in the Amazon, four inhabit India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands, in the eastern Bay of Bengal. They're believed to be direct-line descendants of early migrations from Africa.

After the tsunami in 2004, the Indian government sent a helicopter overhead, looking to see how those tribes had fared. On North Sentinel Island, a man ran onto the beach, and fired an arrow at the helicopter.

Some people think the islanders, being closely attuned to nature's signs, escaped the tsunami relatively unscathed. It's impossible to know for sure — but they definitely didn't want help.

Image: Indian Coast Guard

Still Uncontacted

Photographs released last week of a tribe in southwest Brazil have put public attention on uncontacted people, of which about 100 are believed to exist.

Those tribes, most of whom live in the Amazon, are often described as living fossils of Stone Age life, flash-frozen in time. Such descriptions are unfair: We don't really know how people lived in the Stone Age, and there's no reason to think that uncontacted cultures have not continued to evolve in their own unique ways.

What can be said, however, is that uncontacted people are threatened by disease and development. If they're going to survive, they need help from the outside world.

Wired.com takes you on a tour of uncontacted people and the issues facing them — and us.

(Editor's note: the machete in the photograph was likely obtained through trade with Indians who have made contact.)